The Tunguska Event: The most powerful explosion in documented history that still remains a mystery!

What Happened at Tunguska in 1908?

Time : 30 June 1908.

Location : Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, Russian Empire.

• The Tunguska event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history.
• On 30 June 1908, an explosion ripped through the air above a remote forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska river.
• As witnesses said,” A fireball streaked across the daytime sky.”
• The fireball is believed to have been 50–100m wide. It depleted 2,000 sq km of the taiga forest in the area, flattening about 80 million trees.
• It took only moments to explode in the atmosphere just above Siberia’s Podkamennaya Tunguska River, what is the present day Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia.

Map showing the approximate location of the Tunguska event of 1908.

THE EVENT : It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than to have hit the surface of the Earth.

This armageddon-like event made the earth shiver. Windows shattered in the closest town, some 35 miles away from ground zero. According to the inhabitants of the town, they could feel the heat of the blast and many had also been blown off their feet.

DID YOU KNOW?

1. It is estimated that the Tunguska explosion knocked down some 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 sq km (830 sq mi), and that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter magnitude scale.
2. An explosion of this magnitude would be capable of destroying a large metropolitan area, but due to the remoteness of the location, no human fatalities were officially documented.
3. The 15-megaton (Mt) estimate represents an energy about 1,000 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan — roughly equal to that of the United States’ Castle Bravo (15.2 Mt) ground-based thermonuclear detonation on 1 March 1954, and about one-third that of the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba explosion on 30 October 1961 (which, at 50 Mt, is the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated).

MUST VISIT : The Tunguska Event (FOR FULL INFORMATION)